hanashimashoo

I've always wondered if "pan" (sp?) derives from Portuguese "pão".

こんにちは。
Hi.

I love kanji, the perfect breakfast, like rice porridge.

They say it's French. But who knows.

By the way: It might well be pronounced pã. The n syllable often turns into a nasal, like in French.

heheh

はじめまして、浪人さん。

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dròm_et_rêve, Rounin is right on.

Here's an example of the visual differences between the Japanese writing systems:

Romaji: u
(English pronunciation: oo as in too)
Hiragana: う
Katakana: ウ
Kanji: 鵜

"U" is a type of bird. All those examples are the exact same sound, but if you used hiragana or katakana instead of kanji to write it, in many cases in wouldn't be obvious what you meant.

Typical Japanese writing uses about 44% kanji, 55% hiragana and 1% katakana (yes I just made those numbers up ), although that very much depends on the subject matter & writing style. For example I see a lot of computer related stuff and that often uses like a quarter katakana because of all the foreign words.

Some foreign words are borrowed directly (e.g., printer = pu-ri-n-ta), while others are abbreviated & simplified (e.g., personal computer = pa-sa-co-n). In both cases you've gotta use katakana.

Yeah, kanji is everywhere other than preschoolers' books. Lemme show ya an example. . .


That post is using katakana for the first word ("yo") and to write what country he's from (Norway). I've marked all the kanji red, & the rest is hiragana.

It's beastly I tell ya...well kanji is anyhow; the other 2 are easy.

Do you have some examples?? I never knew they had any!

Boss . . . derives from the Dutch word baas, meaning the master of a trade, such as a master carpenter, or master mason. Probably entered the language through its use by English-speaking tenant farmers of the Dutch "patroons" of the Hudson valley sometime in the late 17th or early 18th centuries.

OOps, sorry, you meant Dutch loan words in Japanese . . .


Never mind, Boss . . .

Am i the only one who is seeing little boxes rather than characters on the screen?

Nah, I'm seeing it too. We don't have support for Japanese installed.

No, I can see the characters here, but not on my friend's computer; you have to have support on the computer that you're using to see them.

Setanta: yes, you're right, boss comes from baas, master, and it did enter the language when English-speaking people in the US heard it, but I'm not sure of what part of the US.

Thank you for your example Monger; I have it now. So, a word like ice cream- 'ais-kurím'- would use Katakana? I know that this may be a stupid question, but with the frequent use of Kanji, how does keyboard input work?

It entered the language in the Hudson valley, most likely, on the estates of the Dutch patroons. That part is of little doubt to me.

It's simply the matter of choice of fonts for your browser.

(If you have the font "Arial Unicode MS", for example, on your OS, try it.)

If you're interested and ya wanna install Japanese language support for Internet Explorer (which I'm assuming is what you're using), just go to any Japanese page (say, www.yahoo.co.jp ) and your browser should ask if you'd like to install it. You may need to have your Windows installation CD handy, but it should only take a few seconds to get it going.

As pages of this forum use unicode escape (i.e., the sequence of the form "&#----;") for non-ASCII characters, you can solve the problem of displaying chinese/japanese characters simply changing the default font for the browser.

Yes Satt, but most people don't have those kinds of fonts installed so they'd need to add Japanese display support the way I explained. (Then after the Japanese support is installed, if a page's Japanese text isn't displaying correctly you'd click View->Encoding->More->Japanese)


dròm, yeah 'aisu kurimu' would be written using katakana. Typing Japanese is actually quite easy & intuitive. (By the way, you can install Japanese IMEs [Input Method Editor] that let you type Japanese in any version of Windows...and Win2000/XP support Japanese reading/writing/filenames perfectly, after turning on a few options.)

Basically, what you do is type out the syllables using English characters, which is converted automatically to hiragana. (Japanese keyboard keys have both english and hiragana printed on them, but most Japanese think it's easier to use the English characters.) After typing any word or character that you want to convert to kanji or katakana you press spacebar (Japanese writing doesn't use spaces) and you'll get a list of all the various kanjis that are used for the characters you just typed. It's handled quite intelligently actually, so it's a bit easier than it sounds.

If one has Word software (though currently I have not), then fonts necessary for internationalization will be installed choosing the internalization support. Or suitable fonts can be simply installed from a Word CD.

Fraid not.

I can only think of one Dutch borrowing into Japanese offhand: the word for "cup", kop --> koppu. Nice, short Germanic closed syllable (until it was borrowed, at least!).

If you go to Nagasaki area, you can see a place called "Oranda Mura" (Holland village) which has Dutch-style houses. There's also a Dutch theme park called Haus Ten Bosch. Kinda weird to see it looming over the rice fields.